The ability to detect threatening stimuli and initiate an escape response is critical for survival and under stringent evolutionary pressure. To detect predators, fish use a number of sensory systems including olfaction (smell) ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 29, 2020
0
44
Mexican cavefish spend their entire lives in the dark. With no need for vision, many of them lost functional eyes. In more than 30 varieties of Mexican cavefish, the eyes stop developing as embryos grow into larvae. Although ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 2, 2020
0
150
Scientists are studying a guppy-sized, blind, translucent fish that lives in the cave systems of northern Mexico to figure out why some animals can regenerate their hearts, while others just scar. Their research appears November ...
Cell & Microbiology
Nov 20, 2018
0
78
After millions of years living in constant darkness, a species of blind cavefish found only in Somalia has lost an ancient system of DNA repair. That DNA repair system, found in organisms including bacteria, fungi, plants, ...
Archaeology
Oct 11, 2018
0
150
Imagine living in perpetual darkness in an alien world where you have to find food quickly by touch or starve for months at a time.
Plants & Animals
May 24, 2017
0
188
We all do it; we all need it—humans and animals alike. Sleep is an essential behavior shared by nearly all animals and disruption of this process is associated with an array of physiological and behavioral deficits. Although ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 23, 2017
5
824
Researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have identified unique anatomical features in a species of blind, walking cavefish in Thailand that enable the fish to walk and climb waterfalls in a manner comparable ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 24, 2016
32
872
Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have shown that well-developed eyes come at a surprising cost to other organ systems. The study involving Mexican cavefish shows that the visual system can require between 5% and ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 11, 2015
3
576
(Phys.org)—In a single cave in Ecuador, a species of cavefish has evolved to do something perhaps unique to them, navigate with their teeth.
Plants & Animals
Sep 20, 2012
0
0
The blind Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) have not only lost their sight but have adapted to perpetual darkness by also losing their pigment (albinism) and having altered sleep patterns. New research published in BioMed ...
Evolution
Jan 22, 2012
47
0
